On the Internet, content sharing platforms or other applications allow users to upload, view, and share digital content such as media items. Such media items may include audio clips, movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, pictures, photos, other multimedia content, etc. Users may use computing devices (such as smart phones, cellular phones, laptop computers, desktop computers, netbooks, tablet computers) to use, play, and/or consume the media items (e.g., watch digital videos, listen to digital music).
One function of ranking services is to take content items made available by the content sharing platforms and arrange a playlist or feed of content items. The playlist or feed may contain a number of content items arranged in a ranking based on an expected popularity of the content items. The ranking services may make these playlists or feeds available to their users for consumption. Given the limited amount of information about the users and their consumption history known to the ranking services, the ranking of content items by the ranking services is often less than optimal.